After a long winter’s hibernation, we’ve finally thawed out. Like flowers in the spring, CRT has opened with fresh life and has revived our frozen newsletter.

Among those signs of fresh life is Ana Schmitz, our new communications associate and friendly, non-geek face. She’ll be integral to our newsletters, convention programs, surveys, and more. Ana comes to us from NAR’s marketing department, and we’re very lucky to have her join us. She’s eager to learn more about technology in general and programming in particular, and she decided that CRT is the place to do that.

Also new this spring is REALTOR® Confidential. This monthly webisode series takes you behind the scenes and lets you share the most confidential business secrets of top REALTORS® --and hopefully get a few laughs. REALTOR® Confidential is produced jointly by CRT, NAR’s Information Central, and NAR’s Government Affairs Division. View the first installment at http://realtorconfidential.org/ or subscribe to our podcast feed to keep up to date on the series. You can also participate by sending in your confidential tips and tricks to us as audio, video, or text.

Speaking of podcasts, 2008 is shaping up to be the year of social media in real estate. REALTORS® who have already been using social media tools have dubbed it RE 2.0, a takeoff on the popular phrase Web 2.0. Between blogs, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and the like, REALTORS® are flooding the Web, trying to find new and meaningful ways to connect with consumers. If you haven’t already checked out these networking tools to see if they fit into your business, now is the perfect time.

To keep up to date with these and future tools, just follow CRT’s blog.

Keith Garner

Posting your listings online should be a standard procedure. From a marketing point of view, the more places a listing appears, the better. The downside is that if you want your listings on half a dozen sites, you have to enter listings manually on each site or invest money in developing an automated system. And if the price changes, you’ll need to update each site individually. So even if you want your listings everywhere online, the amount of time you have to invest in posting and updating often makes widespread listing aggregation more trouble than it's worth.

Fortunately, some powerhouses in the listing aggregation realm recognized this problem. In January 2008, Google, Yahoo, Zillow, and Trulia began working together to create a single, standardized feed that would facilitate the marketing and advertising of properties on multiple Web sites. With help from the National Association of REALTORS® and the newly formed Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO), they've achieved their goal in record time.

The key to making standardization a reality is determining which data elements create the basic feed for each site and then developing a specification around those elements. The final specification contains fewer than two dozen required fields and only about 100 fields in total. To make it more robust, the specification very closely parallels, and draws from where possible, the existing Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS) Data Schema developed by RESO in conjunction with MLS vendors and other industry stakeholders. However, this RETS schema is much more comprehensive, containing more than 1,000 data fields.

Already the new standard is having an effect. More than a dozen other listing sites and vendors have joined the RETS syndication workgroup and will begin accepting or implementing this universal listing feed in the near future. For real estate practitioners, this collaboration means that property information has to be changed in only one place to reach all participating sites. You save time and prospective buyers always have the most current and accurate property information.

In time, the new syndication specification could also be adopted by MLS systems. If this occurs, the MLS could become the single point of data transfer to all listing sites.  The process would be similar to the way listings are now fed to REALTOR.com® but would occur across a much broader scope of sites.

Going one step further, a joint project between CRT and New England-based MLSPIN is developing a simpler data exchange method that’s more closely geared to listing syndication than RETS. This work is very similar to the successful and easily implemented data transfer that sites such as Trulia and Zillow have been working with for the last couple years.

The goal of the RETS Syndication Specification and the new streamlined data exchange method is to minimize the time and effort real estate practitioners must spend to transfer listings geared around advertising and marketing. This change will ultimately increase listing exposure while reducing the burdens of technology and cost.

Chris McKeever 

How to Cook a Roast

A while back, I was faced with a daunting challenge. I’d invited four friends over for a roast beef dinner. Only one problem:  I'd NEVER cooked a roast. Whose idea was roast beef anyway? 

Watching my stress level climb as I pawed through cookbooks for help, my teenager stepped in.   Approaching me calmly, he said, "Look at YouTube for ways to cook the roast right."

I had perceptions about YouTube—silly teenager hijinks, right? What could it possibly teach me about cooking? “No thanks,” I said. “I’ll just follow the directions in my cookbook.”

But he insisted, so I gave his suggestion a try.  After we viewed a few videos on the family PC, I was a bit hesitant but I gave it a shot.  The roast was great, and everyone enjoyed it.
 
While cooking may not be your activity of choice, this simple incident gave me a new awareness of the social media sprouting up around me--of the impact it's having on society and on how these new tools could add value in the real estate arena.

Part of the challenge in using social media for business is that the tools are so new, people are still defining how to use them. Yet, it’s clear that social networking is an opportunity to commiserate, build bonds, exchange ideas, and expand businesses connections. This would seem to make it perfect for real estate.

While social networking is not for everyone, as businesspeople it behooves us to find out what all the noise is about and not just dismiss social media. 

The roast?  There's other ways to cook it.  I’m going to try a different cut next time and opt for the low temperature methods one video recommended.

Social networking may be a fad. Or it may be the wave of the future. The important question is, “Could social networking be the tool for you?” Only you can decide. 

Take a look at the Field Guide to Social Networking for REALTORS®,  courtesy of NAR’s  Information Central.   Are you ready to explore the maze of social media?  There are many sites out there, but here are a few to get you started.
 
NAR-related Sites

CRT blog 
Information Central blog
NAR blog  
REALTOR® magazine editors’ blog 

Ana Schmitz

Creating Your Own Web Videos Couldn’t Be Easier

Everyone seems to be creating Web videos. Here’s an overview that will help you join in the fun.

First, you’ll need a video camera. For most applications a camera in the $400 to $500 range will work well. Look for a model with a microphone jack for an external mic. External microphones are better at capturing dialogue without background noise; a wireless lavalier mic is a good choice. 

The next step--software. Once you’ve shot your video, you’ll need video editing software to create a finished product. There are expensive, multifunctional editing suites like Adobe Premiere, but software like that isn’t required for most videos. Less expensive options include iMovie, which comes bundled with Apple computers, and Jahshaka, which is a free open source video editing suite. YouTube has gotten into the game with Remixer, which allows you to edit videos uploaded to YouTube. Note that Remixer is still in the testing stage. Search the Web and you will find many software options.

Now that you have the ingredients,  it’s time to make a video. Traditionally, videos and movies used storyboards and scripts to outline and organize the shoot. Even though we’re in the Internet age, it still makes sense to follow tradition. A quick and easy way to storyboard and script your video is to use a presentation application like MS Powerpoint or the presentation application in Google Docs. To make your storyboard, use one slide to represent a scene or a section of a scene. Add a setting description, a picture representing the feel you want, and the appropriate script segment. Repeat until you have your video outlined. This will help you decide on a shooting location, materials needed, and cast.

OK. You’re ready. Go out and shoot the video.

When the shoot is done, download your video from the camera to your computer. Open your editing software and add text, graphics, etc. Most of these functions are easy to accomplish with editing software.

The last step—upload your video to the Web. This is the easiest part. There are a plethora of video hosting sites online. Just type “free video hosting” into the search engine of your choice, and you will get a long list to choose from.  In most cases, you may need to sign up for an account with the site.  Then you’ll be allowed to upload a video.  Look for an “Upload a Video” button and follow the short instructions. It will take a few minutes to upload and format your video. Once that’s done, your video is available to anyone. Most video hosting sites also make it easy to embed videos in to your blog or Web site. Simply copy the HTML script for your video from the hosting site into your Web page or blog post.

A simple Web video is easy to create and publish. Use this outline combined with the instructions and help features in the products you use to make your own videos. They’re a great tool to promote your business. 

Ian Smith

Get in the Habit of Regular Data Backups or Pay the Price in Lost Information

Operating a computer system is much like driving a car.  There’s a tendency to ignore routine upkeep and just keep going until something goes wrong.  But as anyone who’s lost vital data to a computer crash or stalled in rush hour traffic can tell you, bad things can happen to you if you don’t do the necessary maintenance.  One of the most important and most neglected tasks in computer maintenance is performing regular backups of data.  Fortunately, the solution is easy.  By automating your backup process, you ensure your data is protected while eliminating the bother of doing it manually.  Getting a backup process in place can be done in these three easy steps.

The first step is to acquire the medium where your backups will reside, the easiest and most common being an external hard drive.  Today, you can get 1 TB external hard drives for about $200 to $300, which should be plenty of space for most backup needs.

The next step is to get software that will automate your backups.  Many operating systems have backup software built in.  The latest version of Apple’s OS X (Leopard) comes equipped with Time Machine; Windows XP Pro includes the Windows Backup Tool; and Linux gives you the combination of rsync and cron.  There’s also a program called Amanda, which works with all three operating systems.  External hard drives often come with simple backup software that may be adequate for your needs.     Whatever software you choose, make sure it supports both full and incremental backups.

Finally, run a full backup which will be the baseline for all your data.  Then setup automated incremental backups, these are periodic backups of the data that has changed since the past backup; Time Machine runs incremental backups every hour as long as it’s turned on, while the Windows Backup Tool is slightly more involved. 

If you don’t wish to deal with the steps needed to get a backup process in place, you can use an online backup service such as Mozy, iDrive, or Carbonite.  These services all provide online storage space for your data as well as software to automate your backups and assist with data recovery.  Online backup services have the added benefit of protecting your data even if your equipment or your facility is destroyed.   Online backup services start at about $5 a month but you will need to have a reliable, fast Internet connection for these services to be feasible.

With a backup and recovery plan in place, you can rest a little easier, knowing that if your computer crashes or is stolen, you’ll still have your vital data.  For more detailed articles on backup, check out the CRT blog.

Andrew Tillman